Honour killing talk: we should be allowed to hear it

Valerie Wangnet

When Uthman Badar's talk, provocatively titled ‘'Honour killings are morally justified’', was pulled from this year's Festival of Dangerous Ideas event in Sydney, I couldn't help but feel disappointment.

Because even if the sole purpose of Badar's talk was to advocate for the oppression, victimisation and ruthless violence against women, and even if his intentions were in fact to unleash a radical ideology fuelled by prejudice onto unsuspecting Australians, it should not have been cancelled.

The Festival of Dangerous Ideas takes place each year at the Sydney Opera House, and is described as bringing contentious ideas to the fore while challenging mainstream thought and opinion. The lineup of speakers this year includes the likes of Salman Rushdie, punk rock protest group Pussy Riot, and up until Tuesday, the controversial Islamist writer and activist Badar.

So what was the basis of the moral hysteria?

It wasn't a fear that one relatively obscure writer would somehow stand before a crowd and craft an argument so compelling it would succeed in shattering the moral scaffolding of each person sitting in the room. A few media outlets seemed to understand it this way, with one describing the talk as having been "slammed as a cheap stunt that could have put women's lives at risk". If so, how little faith in human reasoning, as well as our own moral convictions, do we have?

Rather, it seemed that the basis of the moral hysteria was a strong assertion that anybody with an uncomfortable or challenging idea should be silenced, not from a sense that what that person would say will hold little interest or value to us, but that we ourselves have a moral duty to silence them.

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The danger isn't in the idea. It's an idea, not policy. We have the choice to accept it or reject it.

The real danger stems from our blind and scathing furore - the assumption that one headline, which was reportedly not chosen by Badar himself, warrants a full-scale attack on the character and motives of another individual who we outright refused to listen to.

I strongly disagree with this. As a proponent of humane education, the process of teaching ethical reasoning for the purpose of encouraging positive moral behaviour, compassion, respect and social responsibility, the silencing of Uthman Badar goes against a very fundamental value of humane education. That is to provide two sides of an argument in order to encourage others to develop the relevant skills necessary to make crucial moral judgments, for themselves. This objective comes before instilling an ideology of peace, compassion and respect.

Most of us have these critical thinking skills. They give us the ability to listen to a challenging or "dangerous" idea, push through any rhetoric, and ultimately refuse to adopt it.

And what can we get back from listening to such ideas? I think it gives us a deeper understanding of our own moral values and the importance of fighting for them. It gives us an important insight into an opposing ideal that can help us understand the root of a moral problem and become closer to working on a solution.

This is not even to say that Badar was intending to go into a full-fledged attack on the basic human rights of women. I doubt that this was ever true.

But even if it were, we should've been listening.

Humane education is about equipping individuals with those crucial skills to make up their own minds about the world and how they choose to live in it. How can the following generation achieve this by only hearing what we let them hear?

An ideology should never be imposed onto a person - even if we believe with full conviction that it is the right one. Doing so can stunt any hope of moral progress, and the truth is we have a hell of a way to go in regards to so many social justice issues that are present in our world today.

Let's continue to challenge one another, open our eyes to the things we don't want to, and ultimately encourage a moral stance that is fierce and not passive, clear and not short-sighted.

There is no such thing as a dangerous idea if we know how to react to it in the right way. In this case we didn't.

Valerie Wangnet is the founder and director of ThinkKind, a humane education initiative to encourage kindness and compassion in students through critical thinking and moral reasoning.